Artist: Apocalyptica
Title: Wagner Reloaded – Live in Leipzig
Genre: Rock / Metal / Classical
Release Date: 15th November 2013
Label: BMG Rights
Album Review
This year the lovers of the classical music celebrated the bicentennial of Richard Wagner’s birth. But people like Wagner pose a problem. How are we supposed to deal with them? A left-wing sympathiser, a friend, if only for a brief period, of Bakunin, an Anti-Semite who wrote various essays on this topic, a composer, and the person who brought novel approaches to the Opera cannot so easily be dismissed as a bigot.
It was in Leipzig, the town where Wagner was born, that APOCALYPTICA chose to give their live concert. Their tribute would be inadequate if they didn’t try to approach, in a way they deemed fit, the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk (the total work of art), a concept that it may not have originated by Wagner but his opera ‘The Ring of the Nibelungen’ became the trademark of it. To help them in this materialisation Gregor Seyffert jumped on board, an award-winning avant-garde choreographer and dancer who enjoyed success with his operatic “biopic” of de Sade. As with that, Wagner’s life was approached through a grand proportions spectacle with Seyffert in the midst of his troupe taking the leading role, leaving APOCALYPTICA in the background to set the tone under which events unveil.
And though it is centred on Wagner’s life there are sections in which what is described can be no less than the soundtrack to European History of the last 200 years. There are plenty of modern takes of various Wagner’s songs that want to underline this very analogy between the composer’s life and Europe herself. This is the reason I’m not saying much about APOCALYPTICA’s performance. If the CD is purchased you’ll feel deprived of this highly original and striking live concert the DVD offers, ground-breaking in that it is the first as far as I know that tries to incorporate the concept of the total work of art in Metal music. The whole concert was a triumph not only for APOCALYPTICA but also personally for Toppinen for writing the music, the orchestra, and the dancers.
Tracklist (CD only)
01. Signal
02. Genesis
03. Fight Against Monsters
04. Stormy Wagner
05. Flying Dutchman
06. Lullaby
07. Bubbles
08. Path in Life
09. Creation of Notes
10. Running Love
11. Birth pain
12. Ludwig – Wonderland
13. Ludwig – Requiem
14. Destruction
Line-up
Eicca Toppinen
Perttu Kivilaakso
Paavo Lotjonen
Mikko Siren
Gregor Seyffert – choreography
Websites
http://www.apocalyptica.com / https://www.facebook.com/Apocalyptica
Cover Picture
Rating
Music: 10
Sound: 10
Total: 10 / 10
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